Thursday, January 19, 2012

Imagine a connection between your favorite server's BMC and the PSUs inside that server...

Now imagine the BMC communicates (if asked to do so) the Serial of the server and the ID of the PSU to the PDU through CPL...

Now you get the idea, automated server inventory from the PDU so that you can simply shutdown or reset a server, router, load-balancer or whatever from the PDU (you know when things go really bad and IPMI or console is not an option or simply not working)...

Of course the PDU would be filtering the CPL so that you are not pushing bad harmonics back to the power grid (which is something you will be billed for).

This is the last step for a "content-aware datacenter" : - network : CDP or LLDP - hardware : IPMI + more recently... agentless hardware monitoring - power : intelligent PSU with CPL communication to the PDU (let's call it iPSU)

You could imagine a lot of other things going through iPSU, like being able to control or meter more power-related things in the server.